On March 8, International Women’s Day, Soapstone of Portland, Oregon announced that high desert author and literary arts advocate Ellen Waterston was the 2024 recipient of their annual Bread and Roses Award. According to the organization’s press release, “Waterston is being honored for her work sustaining the Oregon writing community by creating a vibrant literary life east of the Cascades. She has created unique and important events; focused attention on the literature of the High Desert, mentored numerous writers, while writing poetry and nonfiction works that have become an essential part of the literature of Oregon and the West.”
The Bread and Roses Board said, “Ellen has lived in the Oregon High Desert for 50 years. She has loved it, celebrated it, and, in her words, it has been her muse.” They recognized a number of her accomplishments including:
- 2000: founding the Writing Ranch which offers workshops and retreats for established and emerging writers including the annual “Writing Down the Baja” week-long retreat.
- 2002: founding and, for over a decade, directing The Nature of Words, establishing it as the premier annual Central Oregon literary event. The nonprofit also offered year-round creative writing workshops to regional schools, social welfare programs, and at its literary arts center in downtown Bend.
- 2012: Authoring the original feasibility study for OSU-Cascades’ MFA Low Residency Program, where she now serves on the faculty.
- 2014: Establishing the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, recognizing a nonfiction book proposal that examines the role of deserts in the human narrative. The Prize was adopted as a program of the High Desert Museum in 2020.
- 2021: Authoring a monthly column, The Third Act, on ageing and ageism, which appears in Bend’s The Source Weekly, a paper in print and online, circulated throughout Central Oregon.
- 2022: “Sharing Common Ground,” an ongoing interview project featuring a broad range of people who care about the Oregon’s high desert.
Waterston’s own body of work includes a chapbook, three poetry collections, a collection of essays, a libretto, a memoir, and most recently, Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America Along the Oregon Desert Trail. She is based out of Bend.
